Depiction of the Golden Horde at the Battle of Kulikovo in 1380, which contributed to its decline (Wikimedia)

Longreads announced this week their ten most popular exclusives from the year, and Eva Holland’s short history of The Horde is among them. We still have a few excellent emails from Horde members that weren’t included in the firsttwo batches of retrospectives we aired earlier this fall, so now’s a great time to air them. Here’s the reader who goes by “Craig”:

The Horde came about, in my opinion, because TNC had some very clear ground rules for commenting, rules that were not open for debate. The biggest rule, and the one that you could sort of boil the essence of all of them down to, was that it was not a space in which to question someone else’s humanity.

In practical terms, that meant that anybody’s lived-in experiences were to be considered as real, as lived, and not up for discussion. So if a female commenter said the way women are often diminished online is through tone policing, or if a person of color said my experience with the police has often been one of antagonism, anyone who would respond to that person was expected to accept that as real, and learn from it if necessary.

TNC was never a neutral arbiter. He wasn’t looking for a commentariat who fell in lockstep with him politically, but he was looking for one that was willing to see their own privilege and listen to (and learn from) other people. No one was allowed to politely suggest to someone else that they didn’t experience what they experienced. His space was created for people of all walks of life to come together because TNC’s rules made it come into being.

I don’t know if there was truly a triggering event for the Horde’s demise, but if there was, it was the Trayvon Martin case.

TNC wrote a lot about the case, and his writing got disseminated pretty widely, including to some of the darker corners of the internet. Martin was a catalyst for a lot of things in America, including laying some of the groundwork for what would eventually become the Black Lives Matter movement. The idea that the killing of an unarmed teenager could somehow become an issue in which people would choose political sides, like they do for abortion or Obamacare, is insane—but that’s what happened. And when TNC’s writing hit the broader internet, it attracted voices who not only didn’t know TNC’s rules, but had no interest in following them.

Our moderators did the best they could to cull their nonsense, but it was too much to ask them to do, and eventually many of us simply stopped bothering to fight them. I believe it was these voices, and not our regular conservative commenters, who brought about the demise of the Horde as we’d known it.

As a group we are, as silentbeep says, very much alive. We talk daily, and we have met up in the real world many times. But the Horde’s time at a major publication like The Atlantic was probably always going to be finite, because TNC’s talent as a writer meant that he was always going to get too big, and draw too many voices who wanted to talk but didn’t want to listen, to be able to continue the dinner party forever.

From the reader who goes by willallen2:

What I miss most about The Horde is the chance to engage with people I disagree with in a thoughtful, and just as importantly, immediate manner. There is nothing like it that I am aware of, and I have little hope that it will be replicated. The reason it won't be replicated is because the qualities Coates brought to the table aren’t coming through that door again, in all likelihood.

Make no mistake, I had strong disagreement with him more than once (probably none stronger than with his recent analogizing of slavery with the incarceration of violent criminals, which really caused me to miss The Horde as much as anything has), but what made Coates’ salon unique was that, along with having the opportunity for immediate response, which is the primary advantage of a comments section, Coates has a deep-seated respect for observable, verifiable, fact, which one might suppose to be a common feature for people in his vocation, but I can assure you is not. If you wanted to get the attention and time of Mr. Coates, the surest way to do it was to demonstrate how the conventional wisdom, even the conventional wisdom espoused by people he generally agreed with, had the facts wrong, or had ignored salient facts.

This was the quality, I suspect, which has led to so many people, those who generally agree with him, and those who don’t alike, to criticize his work for being too pessimistic. I couldn’t disagree with this critique more. What Coates has is an absolute refusal to be sentimental, and I have a profound respect for this. His frequent (and quite uncommon in a blog) use of original source documents buttressed this quality; the world is what it is, all our gentle, warm-hearted, fervent hopes aside, and nothing is to be gained by ignoring, as Orwell put it, what is in front of our nose.

Coates combined this hard-eyed approach with a willingness to expend a gigantic amount of energy policing, and enlisting the help of others to police, the cacophonous interactions of The Horde. Imagine running a tavern where dozens of people showed up each day, energized and spoiling for an argument, and your goal is get people to slow down, think, and listen. I know I’d be closing the doors, selling the joint, and retreating to a mountain redoubt in about three weeks. The first time I encountered what Coates was doing, I thought “This won’t last long,” and I eventually marveled that it lasted as long as it did.

Was it perfect? Hell no. But in my view of the world, misery is what accompanies the expectation of anything approaching that state. It was damned valuable, and people would do well to better appreciate that quality.

Update from another Horder:

I thought I would chime in with my own reflections/memories of the Horde. I used to comment pretty regularly under the name “isaacplautus.” As a North Carolinian and centrist progressive in the Terry Sanford/Jim Hunt/Kay Hagan way, I probably leaned a little more to the center than many in the Horde. But it was a group of people that I loved more than anyone else on the web, and there is no group even remotely similar in quality of conversation and depth of thought.

I was about 22 or 23 and fresh out of college when I discovered TNC and started commenting. And I was way out of my league in terms of the knowledge that others brought to the discussion. But I never once felt talked down to or condescended to; I looked at so many of those guys with a kind of reverence and awe which an apprentice Jedi has for their master. And I use that nerdy reference in total and glorious sincerity.

The Horde situation was most certainly unsustainable, especially as TNC grew more famous. But how extraordinary that he had that willingness to be so directly engaged with readers. I still treasure the times when he responded to comments of mine, especially the times when he disagreed with me. There’s no question that he helped refine my thinking on a number of issues around race, the Confederacy, and the Civil War.

I feel the same about all the times when I engaged in discussion/debate with the rest of the Horde. As TNC himself would admit, you jumped into the Horde as much to hear the other voices there as to hear TNC. And despite the complaints from conservatives, it was a place where conservative thought could exist. PetefromBaltimore and JohnJMac made a numerous intellectually rigorous comments that TNC allowed to stand. And indeed one could say that TNC’s strict moderation policy was good for conservatives, because it helped them present their arguments in the strongest, most civil, and most intellectual terms.

The thing I regret the most about the loss of the Horde is missing the daily and weekly comments and debates from the extraordinary female voices who regularly posted there. I share the concerns of some over the nature of campus p.c., and indeed I was humbled when you published a Note of mine awhile back on just that subject. But looking back at the Horde, I realize there can be a place for so-called “safe spaces.” The fact that TNC forcefully created a misogyny- and harassment-free zone is part of the reason why we could read so many great and perceptive feminist reflections there. I almost never post elsewhere on The Atlantic because the male voices become so nasty and harassing of progressive female comments that I don’t want to waste my time reading through such angry noise. I love the idea of Notes because I think it does offer a filter to try and recreate the kind of discussion that existed in the Horde, even if it cannot recreate the immediacy and direct back-and-forth engagement that made the Horde so special.

I will always read everything TNC writes because I love his writing, his depth of thought, and his general style. But dare we say that Rod Dreher had the germ of a point when he said that TNC “gave up” around the time of the murder of Trayvon Martin? Those sorts of killings of unarmed black men are indeed an appalling outrage. So in that sense I refuse to make the presumptions and judgements of TNC that Dreher does. These killings naturally spark feelings of anger, outrage, and despair at the persistence of racial disparities and injustice in the U.S. And yet there is a sort of joy and free exploration that I feel has been absent from TNC’s writing for some time.

(And BTW, I think Dreher is being a little glass house in his judgement. Dare we say that he is as rigid in his view of liberals as lost hedonists as TNC is in seeing white supremacy as endemic to America?)

I think my favorite post from TNC from the Horde years was “The Ghost of Bobby Lee.” His insight that white southerners have romanticized the Confederacy out of feelings of pain, wrongness, and deep-rooted inadequacy, invigorated much of my vision of Southern history. And then TNC goes on to make the radical comparison of such naive romanticism among white Southerners with the feelings of blacks “coping with the fact that people who looked like you sold you into slavery. It’s understanding that you come from a place that was on the wrong side of the Gatling gun. It’s feeling not simply like one of history’s losers, but that you had no right to win.”

To read a connection like that, which I would never even have considered before, was like electricity surging through my brain. It is the humanistic and intellectual tradition at its finest. It is the embodiment of Tennyson’s great line from Ulysses: “this gray spirit yearning in desire/To follow knowledge like a sinking star.”

All writers have their own journeys to make. I’ll enjoy following TNC wherever his goes. But I miss the Horde terribly and I miss the sorts of posts like “The Ghost of Bobby Lee.” It was something special; and like all things special, one doesn’t truly appreciate it until it’s gone.

One more remembrance for now, from Stephen Matlock (who initially went by BetweenTwoWorlds):

I know you’re collecting memories and retrospectives from The Horde about Coates, T-N, who for some reason is being discussed as if he has passed this mortal coil and ascended to the Immortals. Leaving aside that unpleasant image, I’d like to offer up this as a memory and an observation.

Mr. Coates, then and now, didn’t give a dang about my comfort or my issues or my thoughts, and demanded that I think my own thoughts and hold to my own integrity, even if it led to my own confusion and embarrassment as I worked through my own thoughts. I’d found Coates somewhere back in 2009 when I was attempting to revise my own worldview after being challenged in an encounter to see a black person as “black.” I had no connections with anyone who was African American. I didn’t know where to start, so I used Google.

One thing led to another—Jelani Cobb/Jack & Jill/Average Brother/Field Negro/Chauncey deVega/Baratunde—people I’d honestly never, ever heard of. Google being Google, it watched my changing reading habits, and one day prompted me to try out this guy on The Atlantic. Ta-Nehisi Coates. Funny name, funny hat. I’d never heard of him, but I clicked and read.

I just read and read for the first few months, maybe six months in all, before I commented. Mostly nothing revealing. Then I commented that Coates was publishing on an ultra-liberal magazine filled with ultra liberals, and where were the conservative voices for people like me? Where was he challenged by opposing voices?

He was kind enough to respond in two ways: Don’t be an ass; the list of contributors to The Atlantic is quite varied—and he proceeded to list the people who contributed along with their apparent political positions in the spectrum from left to right.

And then he said: “Think for yourself. Don’t expect me to be your teacher. Find the facts for yourself and come to your own conclusions.”

Those were two very important things for me to hear. He talked to me as if I was worth giving an honest response to, and he did not attempt to make me his “friend.” He attempted to awaken me to my own thoughts. I took that to heart, started reading more widely and participating more energetically. Then I realized that in my attempts to understand my fellow Americans and fellow humans, I was coming to know more and more about people who didn’t fit my life experiences and the life experiences of all the people of my own past, and who were teaching me that perhaps I was living an unexamined life.

I had to leave, I said one day on the blog. I had to go think. I realized that my taking Coates’ directives to look for myself and think for myself was leading me away from my lifetime of a conservative viewpoint. I would need to leave my extremely conservative religious viewpoint and my extremely conservative political viewpoint in order to accommodate the people I was meeting in the larger, real world. I took some time off to think about the implications of living out my own discoveries.

I wasn’t about to leave my faith—I was and still am a deeply committed Christian, attempting to be faithful to the historic Jesus of Nazareth, born under Pontius Pilate, crucified, died, and buried, and resurrected on the third day, just as I always have. But that faith would have to mean more than a recited creed. It would have to mean action—in my own life, and in my community and my nation. And it would mean my family and friends would likely see me as a crazy person, or a crank, for I was abandoning all that I once held important in the pursuit of living a life that was as honest as I could make it.

I could not go back to what I was before I engaged with the people of The Horde. I was scared to go forward. But—I had to. After a few months of reflection, I decided I would have to go all in, leaving aside anything that was not examined and tested, and as importantly, grasping whatever it was that was true, whether it was agreeable or comfortable.

It has been a wild ride since then. Lots of changes in my personal life, lots of changes at work. I am much more comfortable being as completely sincere and open as I know how to be. I am much more confident in sharing my own faith and values, attempting to encourage people to grow into the people they really want to be, strong and confident and assured of their worth and importance. I am more sure of myself, I have a much wider circle of friends than I ever had before, I am more involved in my community, and I think I am living my life according to my values, after having examined them and found them good.

That is what Coates has done for me. Nothing he did because he wanted to help me. Nothing he did because he needed my approval. He was just being Coates, saying as honestly as he could what he was seeing, and letting me decide whether to see things for myself.

I would not want Coates to be thought of as some minor deity or star. I have never met him, but from what I can gather from descriptions, he isn’t out to be important. He is doing what he’s always done, which appears to be meeting the world as it is and describing it as fully and honestly as he can. What that means to us is up to us.

That was a good piece on the Horde. I would disagree to some extent with Jim’s claim that we “drove away” dissenting voices like Amichel—who, if memory serves, continued to post right up to the reparations article. But that’s small potatoes.

In keeping with the Horde/Khan/Steppes metaphor, I would remind people that, while it was thrilling, being a member of the Horde was also a hard bloody ride. You had to follow along as people far more knowledgeable dove into difficult topics, and you had to search for sources to defend your positions. And more often than not, you had to let go of that stubborn insistence that you were right. As I said to one commentator who had just apologized for handing me my ass, “This is no place to be if you can’t stand being wrong.”

You have linked before to some of the more memorable conversations, such as oatmeal. But I wonder if you have read what, in my opinion, was TNC and the Horde at its best: his pieces on “The Civil War Isn’t Tragic.” That was an on-going discussion, analysis and scholarship that is unsurpassed in the records of the Horde.

The Horde was always a delicate balance. As TNC’s fame grew, he became a bigger target, and no amount of moderation would have stopped the attacks. It simply wasn’t a platform built for that. Most of us miss it, but we go better armed into the world of ideas because of it, and for that, I am eternally grateful.

From another member, silentbeep:

The Horde is not dead, not really. We still talk to each online in other mediums, such as the five-year-old Facebook group we would periodically advertise in the OTANs. (The group is only for TNC commenters, or now past commenters, with extremely rare exceptions, and TNC knows of its existence.) We even meet offline. Erik’s tone made it seem like we’re far gone, and that’s just not the case.

Dan Fox shares a wonderful, in-person memory:

As a member of the Horde, I wanted to relay a story about Ta-Nehisi from his early days at The Atlantic, when had dinner with me on my birthday.

Like so many others, I was introduced to TNC’s writing by Andrew Sullivan quoting him and linking to his blog. I think the first time was something about the financial crisis and the general foolishness of taking advice from guys who guest star on Arrested Development (Jim Cramer). Eventually I discovered that Ta-Nehisi is a fellow fan of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and a Baltimore native. I’d have given him the MacArthur grant based on the Arrested Development and Yeah Yeah Yeahs alone, but then again I’m not on the panel, and I suspect my absence from it has contributed to many great advancements in science and literature.

I wanted to pass along a story that I think reflects the level of commitment Coates has to his commenters, which I think has been a mutually engaging and beneficial relationship. Back in early 2010, I was stuck in a job I absolutely hated, but did allow me frequent TNC’s blog. Frankly, interactions with the Horde and TNC were what got me out of bed in the morning on a lot of days. My girlfriend at the time started commenting too, and we’d talk a lot about interacting with the commenters, how Cynic or Citizen E would write stuff that would blow our minds, how TNC took to her sense of humor, etc.

Eventually, she hatched up a plan: she would email Coates and ask if we could all grab some drinks and talk about stuff for my birthday. To my surprise, he said yes, and we booked bus tickets to New York.

Somewhere along the way, the plan changed from drinks to soul food, to soul food and drinks (lots of drinks). We basically went on a double date with him and Kenyatta.

I guess at this point we should pause: this was 2010, before the Horde was even really the Horde, if I recall correctly. One would hope that the MacArthur committee would not reconsider this “genius” designation if they were to learn that not only did this man agree to meet up with internet commenters, he decided to bring the mother of his child along for that experience too.

Luckily for everyone involved, the only damage done was to our speech and sense of balance, as we talked about journalism, writing, music, and commenting for hours. We talked about commenters as if they were coworkers, which I think is how Coates saw them.

It’d be easy to write this off as a great cocktail party anecdote—and it is—but I think inviting us to hang out with him is really an example of what makes Coates' such a rare talent: he’s willing to dive headfirst into anything and engage with it on an extremely human level, perhaps better than anyone alive at the moment. Whether it be reparations, a foreign language, the Civil War, or mass incarceration, Coates has a preternatural gift to approach topics and people as a professional amateur, in his words.

It doesn’t matter to him that a lot of people think internet commenters are crazy, or that reparations are impossible; if there is wisdom there, he will find it. I think of how he was able to teach me and so many others, not through dry textbooks necessarily, but through primary sources and personal stories.

I don’t mean to take anything away from the generosity Coates displayed in his willingness to hang out with me. I’ll remain eternally grateful for that night. But I think we often think of a genius as one who is able to do complex math problems in their head or recall the meaning of arcane word from Olde English. It’s worth keeping in mind that Coates’s ability to engage is a sort of genius as well. I’m very glad the MacArthur folks recognized that, and as a member of the Horde, I’m proud to be a part of it in some small way.

Jordan Devereaux:

Long-time commenter at The Atlantic, though less recently. The problem with comments on Coates’s blog wasn’t that the Horde became sycophants; it’s that maintaining a highly visible blog that deals with difficult, contentious issues requires paid moderators to keep things in line. No one has figured out how to do that in an economically viable way, so this is what we’re stuck with.

We’re currently trying to figure that out, so your input is invaluable. If you have any of your own Horde stories, email hello@theatlantic.com. Ta-Nehisi is crafting his own response, so stay tuned. Update from another reader:

I was a regular reader of Coates’s blog, back in the heyday of the Horde. I commented rarely, but I almost always read the comments, and these days when I read a piece of writing that I find particularly thoughtful, I often scroll down to the comments on impulse, scanning for the distorted echoes at new angles that rarely appear these days, before giving up and clicking around instead for any above-the-comment-line response I might be able to find from some other blogger.

If I was a mostly-silent member of the Horde, that didn’t stop me from bristling like the others at Wells’s and deBoer’s insinuation that we were there for some sort of redemption from guilt—though I will freely say that Coates and the Horde taught me to move beyond the white guilt that I was accustomed to meekly accept by rote. I was wide-eyed, yes—eyes as wide as I dared, vulnerable to stray particles in exchange for the ability to see a little more clearly. The knowledge is primary. Any emotional response, be it guilt or despair or exasperation, is secondary.

I was a graduate student in the sciences, back in those days, struggling with the transition from the status of brilliant undergraduate at a medium-tier university to that of merely acceptable PhD student at a top-tier university. I was accustomed to shaking off any lingering prejudice against women like an invulnerable superhero. I thought it was my duty to overcome any instance of sexism with a single effortless punch. I thought I was failing.

People sometimes still criticise Coates for allowing so much room for despair. Sometimes you can click straight from an article that says Coates’s outlook is too depressing to one which says he is obviously far too hopeful if he thinks a call for reparations is in any way realistic. But if I had a hope at all of surviving as the only woman in the department, it was only by accepting despair first. Some things cannot be changed, at least not right here and now. Sometimes you can’t just make people respect you. I shouldered up the courage to look that in the eye, and then I shouldered up the courage to carry on regardless.

Ta-Nehisi Coates wasn’t the only one who helped me rearrange my outlook on how to face prejudice. Trudy of Gradient Lair was pretty important, too. I’d ask why it is that black Americans seem to have better insight on this, but we all know why. The best thanks I can offer is to listen to people’s stories even when they aren’t so directly applicable to me as this one was.

Coates made a space where ignorance was acknowledged to be something that could happen to anyone. Then we all worked together to fix that. We weren't looking for redemption. We were looking for enlightenment. We are still finding it.

If you’re not familiar with The Horde, Ta-Nehisi’s community of commenters, this short history by Eva Holland will give you an excellent idea. It begins:

Ta-Nehisi Coates started blogging for The Atlantic on August 4, 2008. His first post was titled “Sullivan… McArdle… Fallows… Coates???” and it laid down his terms from the start: “My only rule, really, is simple,” he wrote. “Don’t be a jerk to people you disagree with.”

The first recorded comment came from “8th Level Barbarian”:

Welcome!

For genius commentary on the D&D lifestyle, search for “Fear of Girls” on YouTube. The original is classic, but the sequel is pretty awesome, too.

One of the most prolific commenters became Jim Elliott, better known to The Horde as “Erik Vanderhoff.” Last month, just before Notes launched, I was emailing with Jim about how the new bloggy section will try to rekindle some of the lost magic of The Horde. Over the past few years, as traffic to Ta-Nehisi’s posts grew and grew, his ability to moderate a civil atmosphere among his readers became nearly impossible. Finally, about a month ago, all of his posts were automatically closed to comments, joining Fallows and Goldberg.

Jim mentioned that he had been writing a retrospective of The Horde, so I offered to post it as a clarion call to other members of The Horde within Notes. Given today’s news of Ta-Nehisi garnering a MacArthur grant, prompting this poignant appreciation from Yoni (known to The Horde as “Cynic”), now seems like the perfect time to post. So here’s Erik Vanderhoff:

Mere happenstance brought me to Ta-Nehisi Coates’ virtual door: A quoted paragraph at Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Dish arrested my eye. Was there a link to follow? Why, yes there was! And follow it I did, to The Atlantic’s collection of bloggers, and I never turned back.

Since that day in 2008, rarely a day went by that I didn’t navigate back to Coates’s page, enamored as I was—and largely still am—with the wordplay of the man I consider the finest prose writer working in the American tongue. Coates has the ability to string words together to form passages that make other lovers of language throw their hands up in despair.

A mild despair—and, if I’m honest, something of a fanboy-ish obsession—were born, and I demanded constant sustenance in the form of blog posts or articles. Other than his Twitter stream, I think it’s fair to say I haven’t missed something Coates has written since. His openness and inquisitiveness attracted me, and dozens more like me. Comment threads were opened and a torrent commenced. Discussing the topics he raised, from the continued salience of Spider-Man to the foofaraw of Ron Paul to the immensity of the first black president, a community formed. I still remember many of those avatars with great fondness: Emily L. Hauser, Sandy Young (Corkingiron), Baiskeli, petefrombaltimore, exitr, JBColo, Craig, and on and on.

The commenters—dubbed the Horde by our host and Khan—were special to me, distinct online personalities that I came to know and enjoy, all the more so because the Khan did not hold himself aloof or apart from his people. No, he waded into the muck and wrestled and laughed and cried with us. (I’ll never forget the day he opened an Open Thread at Noon just to commiserate over the fact that my dog had died the night before.) Coates mustered a digital army, and his unwillingness to hold himself as a leader to that community made us love it, and him, all the more.

And that, I think, ultimately gave us the opportunity to become our own undoing.

Coates was a reluctant sheriff, but I think he came to see that the topics that interested him, and interested us, were contentious ones, topics that made the id—so enabled by online anonymity—come to the fore. Lacking the inhibitions of face-to-face conduct, acrimony was easy, casual, and woe to the pixelated foe who challenged us.

And so Coates had to take up arms, the fabled Ban-hammer used to exile the impolite and repeatedly off-topic, against not just invading demons but occasionally his own legionnaires.

But none of that diminished what made the Horde special. A good comment board—or “salon,” as Coates called it—attracts people who are, at heart, essayists. I think that’s why there were, and are, so many journalists and academics who remain stalwart fans, who without fail crop up whenever one of his pieces has an open thread. At heart, we wanted to talk about the issues Coates raised, and he wanted us to “treat me like I’m stupid” and further his education.

And, yes, we wanted each other’s praise and validation, none more so than from the Khan himself. As with any like-minded community, a certain tendency developed into yes-man-ism and insular validation. But I always found the Horde to be honest and generous to a fault, even when it voiced dissent. I dismissed the complaints among some other Atlantic commenters that Coates only banned those who disagreed with him. (This was most certainly not true, as I myself was reminded of the decorum required under threat of exile.)

The more I thought about the waning days of the Horde, the more I realized that it wasn’t simply the ravening throngs of unrepentant bigots, jerks, and recidivist “what-about-ists” who demanded Coates accept and discuss their interpretations and axioms that drove him away from leaving comments open on a piece. Coates was on a mission to learn, to educate himself and others, and a certain degree of fawning that we, as a community, were developing resulted in a great degree of mob-like acrimony towards those who disagreed with us. It drove away valued, wise warriors of the Horde, like petefrombaltimore, willallen2, and amichel. We became less because of it, but we also became less useful to our Khan and ourselves.

Thoughts, like opinions, are a common enough currency. It is only those that withstand the rigors of trial-by-fire who establish any real value. Once the Horde stopped providing that to Coates, to ourselves, to The Atlantic, we became, if not creepshow commenters pining for a messiah (Screw you, Freddie!), a somewhat more erudite version of the plebeian boards we had fled for the promised land of OTANs, Spider Man, and socio-political criticism.

I miss those early days something fierce. I miss interacting with Coates, with my fellow Hordelings, and, yes, in locking shields and raising spears against the trolls roaring up the pass. Some of us still linger here at The Atlantic, wrestling with the enemies of truth, because the obsession still lingers. But I think I’m at peace with the fact that those days are gone. Should they ever reappear, I can see myself saddling up for another ride.

Despite the easing of taboos and the rise of hookup apps, Americans are in the midst of a sex recession.

These should be boom times for sex.

The share of Americans who say sex between unmarried adults is “not wrong at all” is at an all-time high. New cases of HIV are at an all-time low. Most women can—at last—get birth control for free, and the morning-after pill without a prescription.

If hookups are your thing, Grindr and Tinder offer the prospect of casual sex within the hour. The phrase If something exists, there is porn of it used to be a clever internet meme; now it’s a truism. BDSM plays at the local multiplex—but why bother going? Sex is portrayed, often graphically and sometimes gorgeously, on prime-time cable. Sexting is, statistically speaking, normal.

Donald Trump likes to pit elite and non-elite white people against each other. Why do white liberals play into his trap?

“I want them to talk about racism every day,” Steve Bannon, President Donald Trump’s former strategist, told The American Prospectlast year. “If the left is focused on race and identity, and we go with economic nationalism, we can crush the Democrats.”

Bannon was tapping into an old American tradition. As early as the 1680s, powerful white people were serving up racism to assuage the injuries of class, elevating the status of white indentured servants over that of enslaved black people. Some two centuries later, W. E. B. Du Bois observed that poor white people were compensated partly by a “public and psychological wage”—the “wages of whiteness,” as the historian David Roediger memorably put it. These wages pit people of different races against one another, averting a coalition based on shared economic interests.

Years later, many adults still pine for the days their school libraries, auditoriums, and gyms transformed into pop-up bookstores.

In the early 1980s, the world of school book fairs was “a highly competitive and very secretive industry,” according to a New York Timesarticleat the time. The fairs numbered in the thousands and spanned the United States. They were put on by a mix of organizers: A few national corporations, about 25 to 30 regional companies, and assorted bookstores.

By the 1990s, one organizer reigned: the Scholastic Corporation. Scholastic, founded in 1920 to publish books and magazines aimed at young readers, had purchased several of its smaller competitors. The company became the largest operator of children’s book fairs in the country, a title it still holds today.

But we’re not here to talk about Scholastic’s business history, and I think you know that. If you’re a young adult who attended elementary school in the United States, I’d guess that when you saw the headline on this story, something deep inside your mind cracked open. With an unmistakable pang of nostalgia,the memory of a Scholastic book fair, with all its concomitant joys, came flooding in.

Another big project has found that only half of studies can be repeated. And this time, the usual explanations fall flat.

Over the past few years, an international team of almost 200 psychologists has been trying to repeat a set of previously published experiments from its field, to see if it can get the same results. Despite its best efforts, the project, called Many Labs 2, has only succeeded in 14 out of 28 cases. Six years ago, that might have been shocking. Now it comes as expected (if still somewhat disturbing) news.

In recent years, it has become painfully clear that psychology is facing a “reproducibility crisis,” in which even famous, long-established phenomena—the stuff of textbooks and TED Talks—might not be real. There’s social priming, where subliminal exposures can influence our behavior. And ego depletion, the idea that we have a limited supply of willpower that can be exhausted. And the marshmallow test, where our ability to resist gratification in early childhood predicts our achievements in later life. And the facial-feedback hypothesis, which simply says that smiling makes us feel happier.

At an inaugural desert festival of yogis and spirit guides like Russell Brand, an exclusive industry grapples with consumerism, addiction, and the actual meaning of wellness.

I first felt reality shift when, at 7 a.m. on a Saturday, there was a line for a class called Body Blast Bootcamp, and I worried that there wouldn’t be enough room for everyone.

The draw to this explicitly not-fun undertaking, others in line told me, was that we would be glad to have done it when it was over. We all made it in, and the workout studio was a carpeted conference room where an Instagram-famous instructor with a microphone headset was waiting to give us high fives. “The hardest step is showing up!”

Once we started working out, a person walked around apparently taking Instagram videos, and people were not bothered by this. Another brought a mini tripod to get some shots of herself in action. There was shouting and a Coldplay house remix. Someone offered me a box of alkaline water, and I drank it because no neutral water was available.

The civil-liberties organization has taken a stand against stronger due-process protections in campus tribunals that undermines its own principles.

Last week, the NRA kept defending gun rights, the AARP kept advocating for older Americans, and the California Avocado Commission was as steadfast as ever in touting “nature’s highest achievement.” By contrast, the ACLU issued a public statement that constituted a stark, shortsighted betrayal of the organization’s historic mission: It vehemently opposed stronger due-process rights for the accused.

The matter began when Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos put forth new guidelines on how to comply with Title IX, the law that forbids colleges that receive federal funding to exclude any students, deny them benefits, or subject them to any discrimination on the basis of sex.

The most controversial changes concern what happens when a student stands accused of sexual misbehavior. “Under the new rules, schools would be required to hold live hearings and would no longer rely on a so-called single investigator model,” TheNew York Timesreports. “Accusers and students accused of sexual assault must be allowed to cross-examine each other through an adviser or lawyer. The rules require that the live hearings be conducted by a neutral decision maker and conducted with a presumption of innocence. Both parties would have equal access to all the evidence that school investigators use to determine facts of the case, and a chance to appeal decisions.” What’s more, colleges will now have the option to choose a somewhat higher evidentiary standard, requiring “clear and convincing evidence” rather than “a preponderance of the evidence” in order to establish someone’s guilt.

Their huge mounds cover an area the size of Britain, and are visible from space.

In the east of Brazil, mysterious cones of earth rise from the dry, hard-baked soil. Each of these mounds is about 30 feet wide at its base, and stands six to 13 feet tall. From the ground, with about 60 feet of overgrown land separating each mound from its neighbors, it’s hard to tell how many there are. But their true extent becomes dramatically clear from space.

Using satellite images, Roy Funch from the State University of Feira de Santana has estimated that there are about 200 million of these mounds. They’re arrayed in an uncannily regular honeycomb-like pattern. Together, they cover an area roughly the size of Great Britain or Oregon, and they occupy as much space as the Great Pyramid of Giza 4,000 times over. And this colossal feat of engineering is, according to Funch, the work of the tiniest of engineers—a species of termite called Syntermes dirus, whose workers are barely half an inch long.

At an international conference, allies grieved the loss of the United States they had believed in.

Updated at 2:50 p.m. ET on November 19, 2018

The Halifax Security Forum is designed to be a gathering of the world’s democratic countries, which are allied to protect each other. Hosted by the Canadian defense minister, the Forum’s signature is the brief videos that introduce the annual gathering. This year’s intro showed relay runners, mostly American, at the Olympics from Berlin in 1936 forward, ending in an uncertain baton handoff—a powerful metaphor for the free world’s worries about American leadership in the age of Trump.*

The Halifax Forum, occurring just after President Donald Trump unleashed yet another petulant tirade against Germany and France that culminated in the unseemly taunt that Parisians were speaking German until the U.S. intervened in World Wars I and II, had a funereal feel this year. Allies are grieving the loss of an America they believed in, as it sinks in that they cannot rely on us any longer.

The president says the United States immigration system is broken. How could it be fixed?

President Donald Trump says that the U.S. immigration system is broken, and in recent days he has railed against what he says is an “invasion” by Central American migrants making their way to the United States. Along with a regular diet of tweets to that effect, he has accelerated the process begun during the Obama presidency of deporting those in the country illegally; criticized the migration of family members of American citizens; and called for a merit-based system of immigration.

Trump’s support for a policy that attracts skilled workers might run counter to his administration’s actual actions, but it underscores a conundrum that has bedeviled successive presidential administrations: how to fix the country’s immigration system, with its years-long backlogs and millions of undocumented workers, while remaining competitive in a global marketplace.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez arrives in Congress with a bigger megaphone than any other House freshman. How's she going to use it?

QUEENS, N.Y.—“Choosing not to speak,” Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was telling me one day last month, “is taken and read just as deliberately as choosing to speak.”

Fresh off her upset primary victory over Representative Joe Crowley here, the nation’s most famous congressional candidate was speaking pretty much everywhere this summer—stumping for fellow progressives all over the country, hitting the late-night talk shows, and jousting with her many conservative critics on Twitter.

Last week, Ocasio-Cortez made her Washington debut in similar fashion.

In town for the biannual weeklong orientation session for newly elected members of Congress, the 29-year-old progressive star from the Bronx narrated the experience in Instagram stories to her 642,000 followers, complained about being mistaken for a congressional spouse or intern on Twitter, and called out a conservative journalist who suggested she was dressed too fancily for “a girl who struggles.”

Despite the easing of taboos and the rise of hookup apps, Americans are in the midst of a sex recession.

These should be boom times for sex.

The share of Americans who say sex between unmarried adults is “not wrong at all” is at an all-time high. New cases of HIV are at an all-time low. Most women can—at last—get birth control for free, and the morning-after pill without a prescription.

If hookups are your thing, Grindr and Tinder offer the prospect of casual sex within the hour. The phrase If something exists, there is porn of it used to be a clever internet meme; now it’s a truism. BDSM plays at the local multiplex—but why bother going? Sex is portrayed, often graphically and sometimes gorgeously, on prime-time cable. Sexting is, statistically speaking, normal.

Donald Trump likes to pit elite and non-elite white people against each other. Why do white liberals play into his trap?

“I want them to talk about racism every day,” Steve Bannon, President Donald Trump’s former strategist, told The American Prospectlast year. “If the left is focused on race and identity, and we go with economic nationalism, we can crush the Democrats.”

Bannon was tapping into an old American tradition. As early as the 1680s, powerful white people were serving up racism to assuage the injuries of class, elevating the status of white indentured servants over that of enslaved black people. Some two centuries later, W. E. B. Du Bois observed that poor white people were compensated partly by a “public and psychological wage”—the “wages of whiteness,” as the historian David Roediger memorably put it. These wages pit people of different races against one another, averting a coalition based on shared economic interests.

Years later, many adults still pine for the days their school libraries, auditoriums, and gyms transformed into pop-up bookstores.

In the early 1980s, the world of school book fairs was “a highly competitive and very secretive industry,” according to a New York Timesarticleat the time. The fairs numbered in the thousands and spanned the United States. They were put on by a mix of organizers: A few national corporations, about 25 to 30 regional companies, and assorted bookstores.

By the 1990s, one organizer reigned: the Scholastic Corporation. Scholastic, founded in 1920 to publish books and magazines aimed at young readers, had purchased several of its smaller competitors. The company became the largest operator of children’s book fairs in the country, a title it still holds today.

But we’re not here to talk about Scholastic’s business history, and I think you know that. If you’re a young adult who attended elementary school in the United States, I’d guess that when you saw the headline on this story, something deep inside your mind cracked open. With an unmistakable pang of nostalgia,the memory of a Scholastic book fair, with all its concomitant joys, came flooding in.

Another big project has found that only half of studies can be repeated. And this time, the usual explanations fall flat.

Over the past few years, an international team of almost 200 psychologists has been trying to repeat a set of previously published experiments from its field, to see if it can get the same results. Despite its best efforts, the project, called Many Labs 2, has only succeeded in 14 out of 28 cases. Six years ago, that might have been shocking. Now it comes as expected (if still somewhat disturbing) news.

In recent years, it has become painfully clear that psychology is facing a “reproducibility crisis,” in which even famous, long-established phenomena—the stuff of textbooks and TED Talks—might not be real. There’s social priming, where subliminal exposures can influence our behavior. And ego depletion, the idea that we have a limited supply of willpower that can be exhausted. And the marshmallow test, where our ability to resist gratification in early childhood predicts our achievements in later life. And the facial-feedback hypothesis, which simply says that smiling makes us feel happier.

At an inaugural desert festival of yogis and spirit guides like Russell Brand, an exclusive industry grapples with consumerism, addiction, and the actual meaning of wellness.

I first felt reality shift when, at 7 a.m. on a Saturday, there was a line for a class called Body Blast Bootcamp, and I worried that there wouldn’t be enough room for everyone.

The draw to this explicitly not-fun undertaking, others in line told me, was that we would be glad to have done it when it was over. We all made it in, and the workout studio was a carpeted conference room where an Instagram-famous instructor with a microphone headset was waiting to give us high fives. “The hardest step is showing up!”

Once we started working out, a person walked around apparently taking Instagram videos, and people were not bothered by this. Another brought a mini tripod to get some shots of herself in action. There was shouting and a Coldplay house remix. Someone offered me a box of alkaline water, and I drank it because no neutral water was available.

The civil-liberties organization has taken a stand against stronger due-process protections in campus tribunals that undermines its own principles.

Last week, the NRA kept defending gun rights, the AARP kept advocating for older Americans, and the California Avocado Commission was as steadfast as ever in touting “nature’s highest achievement.” By contrast, the ACLU issued a public statement that constituted a stark, shortsighted betrayal of the organization’s historic mission: It vehemently opposed stronger due-process rights for the accused.

The matter began when Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos put forth new guidelines on how to comply with Title IX, the law that forbids colleges that receive federal funding to exclude any students, deny them benefits, or subject them to any discrimination on the basis of sex.

The most controversial changes concern what happens when a student stands accused of sexual misbehavior. “Under the new rules, schools would be required to hold live hearings and would no longer rely on a so-called single investigator model,” TheNew York Timesreports. “Accusers and students accused of sexual assault must be allowed to cross-examine each other through an adviser or lawyer. The rules require that the live hearings be conducted by a neutral decision maker and conducted with a presumption of innocence. Both parties would have equal access to all the evidence that school investigators use to determine facts of the case, and a chance to appeal decisions.” What’s more, colleges will now have the option to choose a somewhat higher evidentiary standard, requiring “clear and convincing evidence” rather than “a preponderance of the evidence” in order to establish someone’s guilt.

Their huge mounds cover an area the size of Britain, and are visible from space.

In the east of Brazil, mysterious cones of earth rise from the dry, hard-baked soil. Each of these mounds is about 30 feet wide at its base, and stands six to 13 feet tall. From the ground, with about 60 feet of overgrown land separating each mound from its neighbors, it’s hard to tell how many there are. But their true extent becomes dramatically clear from space.

Using satellite images, Roy Funch from the State University of Feira de Santana has estimated that there are about 200 million of these mounds. They’re arrayed in an uncannily regular honeycomb-like pattern. Together, they cover an area roughly the size of Great Britain or Oregon, and they occupy as much space as the Great Pyramid of Giza 4,000 times over. And this colossal feat of engineering is, according to Funch, the work of the tiniest of engineers—a species of termite called Syntermes dirus, whose workers are barely half an inch long.

At an international conference, allies grieved the loss of the United States they had believed in.

Updated at 2:50 p.m. ET on November 19, 2018

The Halifax Security Forum is designed to be a gathering of the world’s democratic countries, which are allied to protect each other. Hosted by the Canadian defense minister, the Forum’s signature is the brief videos that introduce the annual gathering. This year’s intro showed relay runners, mostly American, at the Olympics from Berlin in 1936 forward, ending in an uncertain baton handoff—a powerful metaphor for the free world’s worries about American leadership in the age of Trump.*

The Halifax Forum, occurring just after President Donald Trump unleashed yet another petulant tirade against Germany and France that culminated in the unseemly taunt that Parisians were speaking German until the U.S. intervened in World Wars I and II, had a funereal feel this year. Allies are grieving the loss of an America they believed in, as it sinks in that they cannot rely on us any longer.

The president says the United States immigration system is broken. How could it be fixed?

President Donald Trump says that the U.S. immigration system is broken, and in recent days he has railed against what he says is an “invasion” by Central American migrants making their way to the United States. Along with a regular diet of tweets to that effect, he has accelerated the process begun during the Obama presidency of deporting those in the country illegally; criticized the migration of family members of American citizens; and called for a merit-based system of immigration.

Trump’s support for a policy that attracts skilled workers might run counter to his administration’s actual actions, but it underscores a conundrum that has bedeviled successive presidential administrations: how to fix the country’s immigration system, with its years-long backlogs and millions of undocumented workers, while remaining competitive in a global marketplace.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez arrives in Congress with a bigger megaphone than any other House freshman. How's she going to use it?

QUEENS, N.Y.—“Choosing not to speak,” Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was telling me one day last month, “is taken and read just as deliberately as choosing to speak.”

Fresh off her upset primary victory over Representative Joe Crowley here, the nation’s most famous congressional candidate was speaking pretty much everywhere this summer—stumping for fellow progressives all over the country, hitting the late-night talk shows, and jousting with her many conservative critics on Twitter.

Last week, Ocasio-Cortez made her Washington debut in similar fashion.

In town for the biannual weeklong orientation session for newly elected members of Congress, the 29-year-old progressive star from the Bronx narrated the experience in Instagram stories to her 642,000 followers, complained about being mistaken for a congressional spouse or intern on Twitter, and called out a conservative journalist who suggested she was dressed too fancily for “a girl who struggles.”